Joined: Thu 16 Dec, 2004 10:06 pmPosts: 4095Location: I cant seem to get out of this cryogenic chamber!

Hi All,

As you may have seen, there has been a small amount of interest in bringing an ASM lib with some graphics features to the TI-84+CSE (84C for short).

I have been toying with a few small ideas that i may end up implementing in a preliminary version for BASIC programmers.

There are some pretty serious speed and memory limitations on the 84C which mean that fast paced BASIC+ASM lib games arent likely if the entire screen is utilised per frame. That being said, if there are a handful of sprites on screen at any time, this should be ok.

Just a note, there will be a radical difference between the way this lib and earlier versions of xLIB (for the 83+ etc) work.

One of the BIG traps that older versions of xLIB fell into was people requesting odd or specific features that would only be used *very* rarely, if at all. These considerably slowed the entire lib down for almost no benefit. This is something that i would really like to avoid with this incarnation.

Anyway ive been testing a few small things, but screenshots are difficult to make without a fully functioning emulator. But anyway here is a small tilemap test:

Simple sprite tests, with transparency as well:

Scrolling is not ideal speed wise. Though there are options to speed things up (interlacing etc). The most probable method for games will be to scroll screen-by-screen if that makes sense.

Here are a couple of sprite tests as well:

Left screenie is with no transparency, right is with the transparent colour specified.

The tilemap is drawn as a background and the sprites are drawn over it. The tile that the sprite is over is redrawn every offscreen frame to effectively 'clear' the sprite. The map is not drawn every frame, rather it serves as a background.

Here is an incredibly crappy quality screenshot showing 16x16 sprite (with transparency) moving around. It appears to run a little slower than on calc (due to capture issues).

The 16x16 sprite is made up of 4 * 8x8 tiles. You can specify which tiles in a PIC make up the sprite, and they dont have to be in order in the PIC either.

For example you could say that tiles 1,2,3,4 make up your sprite, or if you say want to have the same body but a different head on the sprite you can say that 55,56,3,4 make up the sprite etc (if that makes sense).

The screenshot is actually drawing 2 16x16 sprites since the 4 tiles that are 'behind' the main sprite are calculated and drawn every off-screen-frame in order to clear the sprite. This saves having to clear and redraw the entire screen ... which would be very slow!

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas/thoughts?

_________________"My world is Black & White. But if I blink fast enough, I see it in Grayscale."

Actually there have been color screen calcs since 1996, with the Casio CFX-9850G series, but back then, there were only 3 pixel colors at once (changeable via contrast settings) and to run ASM you had to flash the ROM chip with special hardware. They were discontinued in 2003.

In 2010 Casio released the FX-cg20 (nicknamed Casio PRIZM), which features a 384x216 16 bits color display, a 58 MHz SH4 processor, 61 KB of user RAM and 16 MB of archive. A few months later, TI retaliated with a color version of the TI-Nspire and in 2013 they released a color version of the TI-84 Plus.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum